The impact of crop plant residues on carbon sequestration in soil : a useful strategy to balance the atmospheric CO2

Anthropogenic emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases was rapidly increased with the Industrial Revolution and this event has caused a world interest in identifying strategies of reducing the rate of gaseous emission. The intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that from 1850 and 1998 the emission from terrestrial ecosystem was about half of fossil fuel combustion. Agriculture can be a source or sink for atmospheric CO2 because soil organic carbon pool (SOCP) in soil surface is sensitive to changes in land use and soil management practice. The carbon sink capacity of the world agricultural and degraded soils is 50-66% of the historic carbon loss that are of 42 to 78 Gt of carbon respectively. Carbon (C) sequestration implies transferring atmospheric CO2 into long-lived pools and subsequent storage of fixed C as soil organic carbon (SOC). In this way the conservation of plant residues in agricultural soil play an important role in CO2 sequestration. The mechanism by which crop residues contribute to SOC is through their chemical, phisical and biological stabilization. In this chapter we discussed the role of the plant residues in the carbon sequestration throughout plant tissue stabilization in soil, giving a new approach and understanding of the plant residue conservation in soil.